Main Parts of a Computer

So first thing's first, a lot of you are probably confused by a lot of the terminology that computer people use when telling you about things. Well my friends, I am here to help. For the sake of keeping this simplistic I won't go into detail about all the little bells and whistles that make a computer work (although I will if I get requests to do so) but there are a few parts of a computer that you need to know to survive in this crazy computer run world we live in.

Main Parts of a Computer

Desktop

A desktop computer is exactly what it sounds like. It is a computer that is not made to be portable but rather just sits on your desk (hence the word desktop). There are four parts to a desktop computer that is essential to you having a good user experience:

Tower

Your tower is probably not is tricked out as these. Here is a picture of a more normal tower.

The tower on a computer is essentially the computer. This is where all the action happens. CDs, Flash Drives, Floppy Discs (anybody remember those?) all go into here where they are processed and the information is given back to you in a form you understand (pictures, text, movies, etc.). It has multiple ports (where you plug things in) to control the monitor, mouse, speakers, keyboards, and anything else you might plug in. All in all, you don't have a tower then everything else won't do anything (for the sake of this tutorial).

Monitor

The computer monitor is the screen that receives the output of your computer. The computer usually generates an image that is understandable by people so that you can control you computer easily. If you are older you may remember that computers required you to code things out in MS-DOS. That is no longer the case, now you have icons and buttons that you can use instead. The icons that you use to control your computer are called a Graphical User Interface (or GUI). When a program says that it is a GUI version, that means rather than you having to look at code and decipher what is happening it creates a window with simple buttons so that you can navigate and use the program more easily. If it doesn't say it is GUI version, chances are (if it isn't an old program) it will have a GUI. As time has gone on these icons have become much simpler and better looking to increase the user satisfaction.

Keyboard

The keyboard is the main medium for input to the computer. Theoretically, you can use only the keyboard to control your computer, even within the Graphical User Interface. It is extremely hard to do though and there is no point in having the GUI if you have to use the keyboard to do everything. There are different types of keyboards out there for different languages, but my guess is you are using they QWERTY keyboard. Why is it called QWERTY? That seems like a really weird name. Well if you look down at your keyboard in the upper left you will see the letters Q, W, E, R, T, and Y all in a row, hence the name QWERTY. There are other keyboard layouts such as Dvorak or JCUKEN but we won't go into those here.

Mouse

The mouse is what people use for most of the functions on the computer (assuming you are using a GUI). This moves a cursor (the little white arrow on the screen) that you use to select objects. Most mouses (for computers the plural is mouses) have four functions: left click, right click, scroll, and move the cursor. Left click is what you normally use to make the icon work like normal. Right clicking something brings up a small menu of different things you can do with whatever icon you clicked on. This is good for special functions (such as if you wanted to save a picture off of a website you would right click and select "Save Picture As..."). Scrolling is done with the scroll wheel between the left and right click buttons. This moves the screen up or down so you can see what all is on the screen.

Laptops

The parts of a laptop computer are generally the same as a desktop computer with two exceptions: the "tower" part of the computer is generally under the keyboard to conserve space and the mouse is replaced with a touchpad (although this doesn't mean you cannot plug in another normal mouse). Laptops are generally not as powerful as a desktop due to it being made to conserve space and be portable rather than run high end programs.